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New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

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Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#61

Post by arunabha »

xvector wrote: post #40
oconnore wrote: post #25

As I understand it, the earliest they could actually strike would be 80 days from today, as per the Taft-Hartley act, putting the strike on November 29 (after the election). Something seems broken when a group is paid relatively fair wages ( https://www.levels.fyi/companies/the-new-york-times-company/... ), works 35 hours a week before overtime, and is talking about going on a strike. I don't think that fits with the…

Those wages are absolutely not fair in the era of modern tech comp. But IMHO people should just find a different job, there are plenty available that pay better.

> But IMHO people should just find a different job, there are plenty available that pay better.

Genuine question, why is that better? There are plenty of reasons why employees might be overall ok with the job and prefer to work out improvements in specific areas. The generally accepted implicit rationale of all of the accommodation needing to be done by the employees(including finding another job) is honestly puzzling. I'm wondering if that is the consequence of employers having vastly more power over employees(esp in the US, with healthcare being tied to employment)

Should the default be a reasonable compromise between the two sides, vs the only recourse being employees leaving?

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#62

Post by malfist »

notfried wrote: post #17

[flagged]

This type of comment shows up on every single post about unions or layoffs.

The answer is always the same: It might take you and a friend a weekend to build a [insert company] clone, but by the time you need to support the level of customers as [insert company] it'll certainly need a lot more work.

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#63

Post by francisofascii »

oconnore wrote: post #25

As I understand it, the earliest they could actually strike would be 80 days from today, as per the Taft-Hartley act, putting the strike on November 29 (after the election). Something seems broken when a group is paid relatively fair wages ( https://www.levels.fyi/companies/the-new-york-times-company/... ), works 35 hours a week before overtime, and is talking about going on a strike. I don't think that fits with the…

I think the contention point is over remote work rights. I would gladly accept these salaries, but not if I have to commute into NYC almost every day.

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#64

Post by spondylosaurus »

mandmandam wrote: post #39
nickff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the NYT isn't left-wing in a global context, and it is likely centrist in New York City, but it is definitely to the left of the median US voter. They're probably anti-union in this case because they're on tenuous financial footing, and unions in New York have a history of squeezing their employers out of business. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times...

> it is definitely to the left of the median US voter. No, it isn't, and it's not remotely close. The median US voter is far more left wing than you would know from politics and media. Most voters actually support an arms embargo vs Israel, support universal healthcare, support action on climate change, want an end to the prison industrial complex, want minimum wage increases, gun control, an end to predatory college…

See also: the NYT's coverage of trans issues, which in recent years has tried to both-sides the topic in a way that gives fundamentalist hate groups equal oxygen as the fucking APA. No self-respecting leftist publication is handing the mic to Mumsnet users and conversion therapy advocates. (Contrast that to the New Yorker, which is hardly a commie rag and yet has been unambiguously progressive on that front, among others.)

An apt quote from Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, which was published in 2013 but set in 2001:

> How right-wing, Maxine wonders, does a person have to be to think of the New York Times as a left-wing newspaper?

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#65

Post by Hasu »

nickff wrote: post #35
Hasu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps the NYT isn't left-wing in a global context, and it is likely centrist in New York City, but it is definitely to the left of the median US voter. That isn't true at all. You're probably thinking of the NYT 20 years ago, under the Bush administration. Do you read the newspaper, or are you parroting talking points? I used to subscribe until the blatantly conservative bias became overwhelming. > They're probab…

According to this source, NYT Opinion is "Left", and NYT News is "Lean Left", and I think their ratings seem relatively well-calibrated: https://www.allsides.com/blog/see-our-updated-bias-rating-ab... You can't just look at results over the last four years when you're analyzing a newspaper that's 172 years old. They've had massive declines in recent years, which caused huge cutbacks. I think it's reasonable for them…

Their methodology is literally, "We didn't like the results we got so we assumed they were wrong and ignored them."

> Surprisingly, ABC News was rated Lean Right (1.18) in the July 2024 Blind Bias Survey. A total of 478 respondents rated ABC. This rating differed from AllSides’ current rating of Lean Left (-2.40) at the time, and triggered the Aug. 2024 Editorial Review.

> AllSides speculates this outlier response is because the survey content was collected on July 15 and 18, 2024, which were just days after the July 14 assassination attempt of Donald Trump.

> The Lean Right rating was incorporated into the final rating for ABC News, but was weighted less to account for outlier conditions.

This is literally just putting your foot on the numbers to make it show what you want - the network showed more right-leaning content and they said, "Well that doesn't count." Why doesn't it count?

Look at the increasing number of criticisms of Times coverage from the Left. Look at their trajectory since the Cotton editorial. Look at how they're covering this election. It's not a left wing paper, under A.G. Sulzberger.

> You can't just look at results over the last four years when you're analyzing a newspaper that's 172 years old. They've had massive declines in recent years, which caused huge cutbacks. I think it's reasonable for them to try to preserve their options to cut costs in the future.

They had massive declines from the mid-oughts to 2018 in line with the rest of the newspaper industry. They've reinvented themselves as a tech media company and are on a better track now, so it makes sense that the employees who made that happen want the same union protections as the rest of the employees of the newspaper!

They also were never doing so badly that they weren't still making millions of dollars in profit, which I'm not willing to call "tenuous" for a newspaper that's 172 years old.

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#66

Post by adw »

hungie wrote: post #51
gamepsys wrote: post #2

This could be a blueprint for how other tech departments unionize, but I suspect NYT is a unique case because of their politics. Can such a left wing cornerstone really afford to look anti-union inside their own house? This gives the workers more leverage than they would otherwise have in other companies. In any of the places I worked at in the past an anti-union consulting firm would have been called in to bust thin…

The NYT is not a left wing organization. It aligns, mostly, with a centrist Democrat politically. That position puts it pretty center right on the global scale. A left wing paper would typically be pretty anti capitalist, anti imperial, etc. which the NYT is definitely not. This is a global forum, it's important to remember that while the democrats in the US are called "the left" there, they really really are not a l…

"Center right" is if anything underselling it. The NYT is to the right of, for example, the Financial Times.

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#67

Post by kennywinker »

mbrumlow wrote: post #55
hungie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining the site, embedding rich media content in the site, managing dynamic elements including apis, ads, etc, managing the cms software, managing payments, building customer service infrastructure, internal tools for developing and launching, security personnel, all the games, tracking engagement and reporting business metrics, building software to manage the physical processes printing and distribution of a ma…

> The complexity of a massive org like the NYT is significantly non trivial. I think that is the point. At face value what they produce, simply should not be that complex. It seems it’s complex for the sake of being a big complex organization. And unions will only solidify that into stone to prevent any sort of optimization that would bring the complexity down.

> And unions will only solidify that into stone to prevent any sort of optimization that would bring the complexity down.

It looks like you've bought into some anti-union talking points. Efficiency is sometimes good. But sometimes it's just a way of shifting profit from workers to capital. As an example: if I replace 100 workers managing a server farm with an AWS account - the money that would have paid 100 humans to have nice lives instead goes to a much smaller number of amazon workers, amazon shareholders, and whatever "savings" my company realizes goes to me the owner. So wealth concentrates in shareholders hands, and workers are laid off. Does that make the world better? Not really... more efficient, yes. More fragile and subject to one EMP or earthquake taking out trillions of dollars? Also yes.

Re: New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike

#70

Post by paperplatter »

tptacek wrote: post #33
wpietri wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think at least these days, usage of the term can include customers. For example, this from the University of Maine's Bureau of Labor Education: "Customers may refuse to cross a picket line and picketers have the right to ask customers to honor their picket but should not intimidate, block customer access, disparage a company’s product, or say anything that is untrue or casts the product in a false or misleading lig…

Not transacting with a business in solidarity with an ongoing strike is a boycott. People can boycott the NYT in support of the strike. But crossing a picket line is a much, much bigger deal than not participating in a boycott. If you skip the NYT Mini Crossword for a week to support the strikers, I respect that, but I'm going to keep pushing for that sweet 15s finish this week and I'm going to sleep fine doing it.

There's no need to justify how you do business with the NYT, whether it's playing a crossword game or accepting a job. But either one is referred to as crossing the picket line.
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